By the lights of medical prognostication, Albert Einstein should have died five years earlier than April 18, 1955. Einstein had experienced bouts of abdominal pain with occasional vomiting for many years, and in December 1948 Dr. Rudolph Nissen at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital performed an exploratory laparotomy and found a “grapefruit-sized” abdominal aortic aneurysm. Midcentury vascular surgery had not yet developed open or endovascular grafts for the repair of aortic aneurysms, and the surgeon wrapped the weakened blood vessel with polyethylene cellophane.1 Einstein was discharged on January 13, 1949.
Einstein was living on borrowed time. A large untreated abdominal aortic aneurysm was typically associated with a median survival of nine months.2 The cellophane-induced foreign-body reaction and fibrosis may well have strengthened the walls of Einstein’s weakened abdominal aorta and delayed its rupture until April 13, 1955, when he collapsed while experiencing right upper-quadrant abdominal pain. Called in for consultation, Dr. Frank Glenn, chief of surgery at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, went to Princeton and proposed a highly risky resection of the aneurysm. Einstein declined, replying, “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”3
Einstein was admitted to Princeton Hospital on April 15. The day before he died, he was jotting down calculations (twelve pages of “tightly written equations” were found next to his deathbed).4 At 1:15 a.m. on April 18, the night nurse, Alberta Rozsel, heard a few German words (incomprehensible to her), two agonal breaths … and then he was gone.5
Figure 2.1. Thomas Stoltz Harvey, MD, chief of pathology at Princeton Hospital, as photographed (but never published) for Life magazine by Ralph Morse in the hospital’s pathology laboratory on the day that Einstein died. (Ralph Morse, “Einstein’s Pathologist,” in Life, April 18, 1955.)
Enter Thomas Stolz Harvey, MD (Figure 2.1). The forty-two-year-old chief of pathology at Princeton Hospital was notified of Einstein’s death at dawn. That morning the Yale- and University of Pennsylvania-trained pathologist performed the autopsy in the presence of Einstein’s executor and fellow émigré, Otto Nathan. Only Harvey’s later recollections record the events of that day; the Princeton Hospital autopsy report has been missing for decades. Further procedural irregularities on that April morning included the removal of Einstein’s eyes by his ophthalmologist, Dr. Henry Abrams, possibly during the interval when Dr. Harvey left the morgue to speak to the reporters gathered at the front steps of Princeton Hospital.6
When I spoke with Harvey (over fifty-five years later) about the postmortem examination, he recalled his findings of an abdominal aortic aneurysm and an “abdomen full of blood.”7 He had found a hemorrhage into the tissues surrounding the gallbladder, mimicking a gallbladder attack but actually occurring in the more ominous setting of an abdominal aortic aneurysm (the Einstein sign).8 Harvey also recollected that the inner wall of the aorta was “just riddled with [cholesterol] plaques,”9 reflecting Einstein’s (and his generation’s) blissful ignorance of the perils of a cholesterol-rich diet. If the cellophane-induced fibrosis of the aorta from the surgery in 1949 was found, its presence goes unrecorded. On the morning of April 18, Harvey announced to the gathered journalists that “a big blister on the aorta which broke finally like a worn out inner tube” was the cause of death.10
After systematically examining Einstein’s viscera earlier that morning, Harvey opened the cranium with a saw, incised the dura (sometimes inadvertently slicing into the cortex, as we would find in 2011), severed the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, cut the intracranial portions of the carotid and vertebral arteries, and adroitly lifted the gelatinous brain up from the cranial vault, its abode for seventy-six years. A tissue fixative, formalin, was injected through the carotid arteries to infuse the brain and ensure maximal preservation. A “less important” brain would have warranted the more routine preservation technique of immersion in formalin without arterial infusion. Einstein’s brain was both perfused and immersed in a formalin bath, where strings held it suspended in the liquid to prevent flattening before the formalin-induced hardening could set in. The preservation of the brain tissue was performed with room temperature fixative—the standard in midcentury neuropathology. Even though Watson and Crick had discovered that DNA was the genetic code of life in 1953,11 preservation techniques for DNA were not in routine use in 1955. Thomas Harvey could not know that at the ambient temperature of the Princeton Hospital morgue, the inexorable laws of thermodynamics and enzymology irrevocably denatured Albert Einstein’s strands of DNA into fragments (snippets), barring the way for any future attempts to reassemble his genome in its entirety.12
The front page of the next morning’s New York Times ran the headline “Dr. Albert Einstein Dies in Sleep at 76.” Above the fold, the article’s sixth paragraph noted that “the body was cremated without ceremony … after the removal, for scientific study, of vital organs, among them the brain that had worked out the theory of relativity and made possible the development of nuclear fission.”13
This was very unexpected (and possibly unwelcome) news for Einstein’s eldest son, Hans Albert, and stepdaughter, Margot. (At this point Einstein had been predeceased by his two wives, and his youngest son, Eduard, was institutionalized.) Hans Albert (as recounted by Harvey) was “very upset” that not all his father’s organs had been cremated. The small-town pathologist gently reminded him that he had signed the permit for autopsy and, with inspired boldness, that this was an unprecedented and vanishingly rare opportunity to study the brain of a genius. Harvey also assured him this would be a scholarly, scientific study not to be sensationalized in popular publications, such as Time.14 Hans Albert, himself a professor specializing in hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, saw the scientific merit of Harvey’s compelling proposal to retain the brain for anatomical study. Whether Einstein’s executor, Otto Nathan, thought otherwise is not known. With permission granted by Einstein’s eldest (and only mentally competent) son, Nathan had no choice but to comply.15
The confusion regarding the propriety of preserving his brain for study arises in no small part from the lack of directives that Einstein provided. The assertion that “in accordance with his wishes, he was cremated in Trenton on the afternoon he died, before most of the world had heard the news” lacks any documentation of those so-called “wishes.”16 If such wishes were expressed to Hans Albert, Otto Nathan, or Einstein’s secretary and housekeeper, Helen Dukas, they were left unrecorded. Nathan averred that no “specific oral instructions that his body was to be used for scientific research” were given but that Einstein had remarked “from time to time on the usefulness of the human body after death.”17 Neither does Einstein’s Last Will and Testament of March 18, 1950, provide any guidance as to the disposition of his mortal remains.18 Witnessed by his great friend and colleague Kurt Gödel, the document disposed of $75,000 in five legacies, bestowed manuscripts and royalties to Hebrew University, and bequeathed his violin to his grandson … but no mention is made of cremation, funeral rites, interment, or final arrangements for his body.
It remains an unanswered question as to whether Einstein would have been aggrieved, intrigued, or uncertain over the utility of studying his brain anatomy. There is modest evidence that Einstein was interested in the functions of his own brain. In the 1940s he wrote a detailed description of his thought processes (“visual and some of muscular type”) when solicited by his colleague, the mathematician Jacques Hadamard, who was writing a book about mathematical creativity and the mathematician’s mind.19 In 1945 Einstein consented to have Dr. Gustav Bucky, his friend and patent coholder, perform a plain skull x-ray (anterior-posterior and lateral views) for unknown reasons. (The films subsequently fetched $38,750 at auction in 2010.) Could this have been nascent neuroanatomical research? In 1951 Einstein (along with John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener) underwent electroencephalography (EEG) at Massachusetts General Hospital to assess changes in his brain waves while relaxing or thinking about problems of relativity.20 In his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein declares that “the essential in the being of a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks.”21 Based on these glimpses of Einstein’s interest in his own cognition, I believe he would have endorsed the spirit of scientific inquiry that led Harvey and his successors to begin studying his brain on April 18, 1955.
Permission secured, Harvey confronted the audacious task of studying the brain of the man who was arguably the greatest genius of our epoch. First and foremost, the brain required a few days to harden enough to permit handling outside its formalin bath. From that point, “measurements and external observations will be made before it is dissected, photographed in color and analyzed.”22 No color photographs of Einstein’s brain in 1955 have ever surfaced, and this would not be the last time the Princeton pathologist’s intentions failed to materialize. Of greater significance was Harvey’s decision to dissect the brain. As we would learn over a half century later, it is exceedingly difficult to assess the complex three-dimensional surface of the brain by examining two-dimensional photographs. Once the brain was cut apart, the opportunity for a truly detailed examination of the external cortex was lost. When queried as to whether “the brain could be reassembled after its dissection in small segments for minute studies,” Dr. Harvey replied in the negative.23 Harvey would section the dissected blocks of brain tissue into microscope slides and study the fine anatomy (histology) of neurons, their connections (axons and dendrites), and their supporting cells (glia), but he irrevocably gave up the chance to examine Einstein’s intact gross cortical anatomy. This trade-off was the keystone of Harvey’s overarching philosophy as he took his first faltering steps to approach the “problem” of Einstein’s brain. Forty-five years later, he confided to me that he “had never really related this [Einstein’s genius] to gross morphology of the brain.”24 For the record, Harvey believed that microscopic neuroanatomy would be the most informative approach.
On April 20 Harvey was quoted as saying that “the study [of Einstein’s brain] will be made by a team of outstanding medical men,” and among them would be Dr. Harry M. Zimmerman, chief of the laboratory division at Montefiore Hospital and Harvey’s mentor at Yale.25 Two days later Harvey declined to name the other physicians who would work with him and now said Dr. Zimmerman “might” be among the group. Harvey also announced that a conference would be held on April 25 “to work out plans for the study of Dr. Albert Einstein’s brain.”26 The Princeton Hospital Board of Trustees balked at handing the public relations gold mine that was Einstein’s brain over to a hospital in the Bronx and thwarted Harvey’s scholarly intentions. Months would pass before Zimmerman would see not the intact brain but a slide set—a bittersweet experience for the neuropathologist who in 1953 had personally convinced Einstein to lend his name to the fledgling medical school that Zimmerman had founded! Harvey’s conference of outstanding medical men was further derailed when Otto Nathan, livid at the “utterly distasteful notoriety” now surrounding the brain, demanded the cancellation of the conference and suspended further “analysis or study of any kind” of the brain.27
Harvey drove from Princeton to Nathan’s Greenwich Village apartment and met with the incensed executor. The substance of the conversation is not known, but somehow he placated and regained Nathan’s confidence—for a time. Throughout the journey of Einstein’s brain, Harvey had a knack for changing his course as circumstances dictated. At the close of April 1955, we find Harvey, a general pathologist with neither academic credentials nor specialized expertise in neuropathology, forced to improvise an approach to the World’s Most Important Brain without benefit of the sagacious Harry Zimmerman or a team of neuropathologic luminaries.
How was Thomas Harvey to proceed? In medicine (no less than many other fields), exceptional mentors may inordinately influence the training process. In Harvey’s case his “intellectual bloodline” descended from several teachers who profoundly shaped clinical neuroscience in the twentieth century. After contracting tuberculosis in 1937 Harvey ultimately graduated from the Yale School of Medicine in 1941. From 1934 to 1939 as a Yale undergraduate and medical student he was within the orbit of Harvey Cushing (arguably, the most famous neurosurgeon in the world), and Cushing encouraged him to enter the emerging field of neurosurgery.28 (Rickman Godlee had surgically removed a brain tumor for the first time in 1884—only a half century earlier.) Harvey Cushing trained the men (and one woman, Louise Eisenhardt) who would define neurosurgery throughout the world in the twentieth century. One of his most gifted trainees off and on from 1919 to 1928 was Percival Bailey, who hailed from Little Egypt (southernmost Illinois).29 Bailey and Gerhardt von Bonin wrote The Isocortex of Man in 1951, and Thomas Harvey’s dog-eared and heavily annotated copy of this tome served as both bible and atlas as he embarked on his study of Einstein’s brain. In the book’s first pages, Bailey and von Bonin declare that “the architecture of the cerebral cortex is the main topic of this study.”30 They disagreed with the prevailing neuroanatomical maps of K. Brodmann31 (1909) and A. W. Campbell32 (1905) (Figure 2.2 and Figure 2.3), which parcellated the human cerebral cortex into forty-three and fourteen areas, respectively. They inveighed against such black-and-white maps giving “a false impression of areal boundaries” and underlying a “shaky foundation” for clinical work.33 They departed from the methods of Brodmann and Campbell by cutting not forty-three or fourteen but twenty-one sections of cortex perpendicularly oriented to the brain’s surface. The formalin-perfused cerebral tissue was embedded in celloidin (hardened nitrocellulose) and stained with thionine (a cell body stain). Harvey, an apt pupil, used some of Bailey’s methods but then struck out on his own to cut Einstein’s hemispheres into 240 blocks. Emulating Bailey, Harvey also employed a cell body stain to visualize neurons, but he preferred Nissl stain, which demarcated each cell body’s rough endoplasmic reticulum, a site of protein synthesis. Not content with delineating neuronal cell bodies alone, the Princeton pathologist used a Weigert stain to trace the course and extent of myelinated axons, which connect each neuron with many others. In neuroanatomical parlance the gross appearance of the brain’s countless cell bodies (neurons and glia) is termed gray matter and that of the myelinated axons is described as white matter (although to my eye they appear pinkish tan and light beige, respectively). Harvey’s decision to stain both Einstein’s gray matter and white matter appears inevitable from our perspective of twenty-first century neuroscience, but in 1955 it was prescient (and sixty years later, we are just beginning to explore the significance of Einstein’s white matter).
Figure 2.2. Brodmann’s classical map of lateral (top) and medial (bottom) human cortex designated forty-three histologically distinct areas. (There are gaps in his numbering system, which goes to fifty-two.) This map was based on a decade of meticulous study of the microscopic anatomy of Nissl (cell body) stained slides of the human brain. (Korbinian Brodmann, Localisation of the Cerebral Cortex: The Principles of Comparative Localisation in the Cerebral Cortex Based on Cyto-architectonics. New York: Springer, 2006.)
Figure 2.3. A. W. Campbell’s 1905 map of lateral (top) and medial (bottom) surfaces of the left hemisphere of a forty-one-year-old man delineated fourteen areas. Campbell stained both cell bodies and myelinated nerve fibers to differentiate cortical regions. Unlike Brodmann, who focused on purely histologic localization, Campbell’s map additionally sought to point to exact areas of cortex with known function. (A. W. Campbell, Histological Studies on the Localization of Cerebral Function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905.)
Truth be told, neurology was a relatively young science in 1955. The building block (and seminal concept) of central nervous system anatomy, the neuron, awaited scientific recognition until the awarding of the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—a scant forty-nine years before Harvey began to cut Einstein’s brain. Even at that Nobel Prize ceremony, the recipients, Santiago Ramón y Cajal34 and Camillo Golgi,35 wrangled from the dais over whether the neuron was an individual unit or part of a single, all-encompassing neural network—a syncytium. Sanford Palay and Edward De Robertis’s electron microscopy in 1954 would once and for all reveal the neuron’s anatomical discontinuity at the synapse and validate the neuron doctrine of the neuron as a single unit.
However, before Harvey could begin to use his Nissl and Weigert stains on the eighty-five or eighty-six billion or so neurons that constituted Einstein’s brain, it needed to be cut into blocks and microscopic sections. And to accomplish this, he would have to cross the Delaware River and enlist the assistance of an old friend, Marta Keller.
Thomas Harvey’s well-laid plans to become a pediatrician were derailed when he contracted tuberculosis in 1939, requiring a prolonged convalescence in a sanatorium, and again during World War II, when he worked in the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland.36 After the war Harvey decided to pursue a career in pathology, a field in which he received additional training at Yale. After a rotating internship from 1947–1948 at the legendary and now defunct Philadelphia General Hospital, Harvey was offered a position as an assistant to Fritz Heinrich Lewy (becoming Frederick Henry Lewey in 1940) at the University of Pennsylvania. His boss had attained neuropathologic renown as a twenty-seven-year-old with the discovery of the neuronal inclusion (Lewy body) that became the hallmark of Parkinson’s disease.37 Lewy, the son of a Jewish physician, fled Germany in 1933, and fourteen years later one of the German technicians who had followed him to his laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania was Marta Keller.
Keller was a master of embedding blocks of brain in celloidin, and she was one of only eleven technicians in the United States qualified to section the blocks with the twelve-inch blade of the Sartorius microtome, “the state-of-the-art brain slicer of the mid-1950’s.”38 Marta Keller’s expertise with neurohistologic specimens was invaluable to Harvey, who in the spring of 1955 was trying to reconcile the disparity of Einstein’s towering intellect with the 1,230-gram average-sized brain removed in the autopsy room of Princeton Hospital. For the next eight months, Harvey would drive from Princeton to Philadelphia once or twice monthly and upon arriving look through a microscope at the slides prepared by Keller. The brain was cut into 240 blocks at Penn, and during his visits Harvey would direct Keller to the next portions of the brain to be embedded in celloidin, sectioned on the microtome, and stained. The brain was gradually transformed from two recognizably intact hemispheres into 240 gauze-wrapped chunks of cerebral tissue floating in two glass jars of formalin. When the brain was not being sectioned, it was stored in a locked basement closet of the Anatomy/Chemistry Building of Penn’s Graduate School of Medicine.39 It is likely that Harvey carved out the 240 blocks, and Keller sliced the fine sections from each embedded block. Dr. Harvey told me they made twelve sets of slides, with about two hundred slides per set.40 Each slide was correlated with a numbered brain block, and the original anatomical location of each block was shown on Harvey’s meticulously drawn road map (Figure 1.5). One part of Einstein’s brain was not deemed essential for microscopic examination—the cerebellum. This “little brain” orchestrates the coordination of voluntary movements but was not thought by Harvey and his contemporaries to play a significant role in intellect. This may be why no histologic images of the cerebellum were found among the 350 digital neuroanatomical images selected out of 567 microscope slides in the National Museum of Health and Medicine Harvey Collection.41
At some point in late 1955 or early 1956, Thomas Harvey had thousands (twenty-four hundred, actually) of microscope slides; 240 brain blocks; and dozens, if not hundreds, of photographs of Einstein’s brain. Now, he needed to draw deeply on his own expertise and find the best and the brightest of mid-twentieth-century neuroscientists to decipher Einstein’s neuroanatomy.
Before we begin to track the on-again, off-again—and at times errant—route of Dr. Harvey and Einstein’s brain, I should draw the reader’s attention to my business-as-usual choice of the possessive verb—“had”—when describing Harvey and his relationship to Einstein’s brain—whole, cut up, and otherwise. It begs the question: Who owned Einstein’s brain?
Let me unequivocally declare from the outset that I’m not a jurist—not even close! Regarding “ownership” of the brain, I believe the answer depends on the historical time frame. The biomedical ethos of 1955 was very different from our contemporary approach to patient-centered issues, which are dominated by informed consent and privacy regulations (i.e., the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act [HIPAA]). Harvey’s actions on April 18, 1955, reflected the prevailing belief that a human organ procured at autopsy was a scientific “specimen or object” and that working on human material enabled the physician to “acquire property rights.”42 In the void left by the absence of written directives for the disposal of Einstein’s mortal remains, Harvey was able to obtain permission for scientific study from Einstein’s closest (and competent) living relative (his son, Hans Albert) and Einstein’s executor, Otto Nathan. This was likely a verbal or handshake agreement; if there was a signed consent form, it has never surfaced (and for that matter, informed consent in 1955 would not encompass genome sequencing, which is commonplace in the study of biological specimens today). A scholarly scientific study was proposed with absolute avoidance of the popular press (“not Time,” in Harvey’s words), crass commercialism, and monetary gain. From that point on, Einstein’s brain was in Harvey’s personal possession as a scientific specimen to study indefinitely. He kept it on shelves in the cellar of his Princeton home or in a cider box under his desk when he moved to the Midwest. With the possible exception of its sojourn (and sectioning) at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, Harvey and Einstein’s brain were inseparable until he gave the two jars of brain blocks to Dr. Elliot Krauss at the Medical Center of Princeton in the 1990s. Harvey’s contemporaries were divided on the legitimacy of his retention of the brain. Although Einstein was by no means an observant Jew, a rabbi exhorted Harvey to relinquish the brain and proceed with a proper funeral.43 On the other hand, Otto Nathan criticized Harvey for not producing the promised research publications on Einstein’s brain, with the implication that he should retain the brain and get on with its study.44
On a related note of human organ ownership, then, as now, “no case law has fully clarified whether you own or have the right to control your tissues. When they’re part of your body, they’re clearly yours. Once they’re excised, your rights get murky.”45 The foregoing statement refers to the disposition of what is arguably humankind’s most famous tissue—HeLa cells—which were removed from the cancerous cervix of Henrietta Lacks without her (or her family’s) knowledge or consent only four years before Einstein’s autopsy. These were the first human cells to grow well under laboratory conditions, and as far as we can tell they are immortal! In the 1950s, like Thomas Harvey, the physicians at Johns Hopkins who biopsied Henrietta Lacks’s tumor and sent the tissue for cell culture did not seek permission regarding the disposition of biological specimens. The fate of HeLa cells over the next half century is emblematic of the shift in medical (and societal) mores. Henrietta Lacks’s family did not learn that she was the source of HeLa cells until 1973. Eventually, they learned of the immense biomedical research utility and commercial value of the cells. The HeLa genome in its entirety was published in 2013 without the family’s knowledge. Rebecca Skloot raised the hue and cry in the New York Times: “The publication of the HeLa genome without consent isn’t an example of a few researchers making a mistake. The whole system allowed it. Everyone involved followed standard practices. They presented their research at conferences and in a peer-reviewed journal. No one raised questions about consent.”46
Seemingly in response to these criticisms, in August 2013 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Lacks family reached an agreement in which a committee that included Lacks’s family members would grant access going forward to the HeLa genomic sequence data.47 How did Einstein’s brain escape a similar fate of supervision and research regulation? Most importantly, the present climate of health information confidentiality confronts the dilemma that the genome can increasingly be used to determine our biological fate. For instance, if your health insurer could access your whole-genome sequencing data and determine that you have an increased likelihood of developing Alzheimer disease, it might classify you as a bad risk and increase your premium or refuse long-term insurance. In the case of HeLa cells, the presently available DNA sequence “can reveal certain heritable aspects of Lacks’ germline DNA, and can thus be used to draw inferences, admittedly of uncertain significance, about her descendants.”48 The Lacks family’s all-too-legitimate concerns do not carry over to Einstein’s DNA sequence, which was irretrievably denatured by the standard room-temperature preservation techniques in the 1950s. We are unable to reassemble Einstein’s DNA snippets into a complete genome that would reveal the potential biological strengths and weaknesses of his descendants. Unlike the Lacks’s large multigenerational extended family, Einstein’s lone sibling, two wives, three children, and grandchildren are all dead, and no great-grandchildren have come forward to contest the perquisites of the scientific retention and study of his brain. The fragmentation of Einstein’s DNA mercifully allows me a quick and definitively negative response to the mildly crackpot requests I have received for “just a little piece” of Einstein’s brain tissue, which could be sequenced and cloned ostensibly to “grow another Einstein.”
With the road to Einstein’s DNA blocked, much, but not all, of the inducements to wrest ownership of the brain have fallen by the wayside. In brief, HeLa cells justifiably have immense commercial value. It is estimated that twenty tons of these cells have been grown in culture and that eleven thousand patents use HeLa cells.49 For example, as of 2014 if you wanted to test a new vaccine, a commercial laboratory (Sigma-Aldrich) would sell you a made-to-order vial of HeLa cells for $496. In contrast, with the demand of curiosity seekers excepted, there is no comparable commercial potential for the use of Einstein’s tissue (although the digitized images of microscope slides of his brain can be purchased from iTunes for $0.99).50 Lacking the inducements of financial gain or the threat of exposing their genome, no relatives or other interested parties have come forth to demand the 180 remaining brain blocks last reported to be in the possession of Dr. Krauss and the recently relocated University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro.51
Given the lack of financial incentive, the paucity of descendants, and Einstein’s fragmented DNA jigsaw puzzle, the ownership of Einstein’s brain is unlikely to be contested unless there is yet another sea change in our attitudes governing the possession of human tissue. However, from my personal experience in clinical neurology, these ethical, scientific, and cultural mandates can shift relatively quickly. As a first-year neurology resident at the University of Virginia in 1976, I was given a whole human brain for the purpose of teaching and demonstrating neuroanatomy to medical students. Over the ensuing decades, I have used this specimen for the instruction of medical students and even a fourth-grade science class! Previously, when a specimen such as this had served its purpose, it would be incinerated. With the changing ethical landscape over the last twenty years, a proper burial of this brain (which was once a part of a living sentient human being) now seems very appropriate. The medical school faculty members who taught me in the 1970s would have regarded the interment of an organ used in the anatomy lab as unorthodox. Change, no less in human biology than any other field of endeavor, is inevitable.
As 1955 drew to a close, Thomas Harvey was the “owner,” for better or worse, of the aforementioned meticulously prepared photographs, microscope slides, and blocks of Einstein’s brain. Just what was in the intellectual tool kit of Harvey and those who presumed to study the brain half-way through the twentieth century?